While I don’t comment on it much here, I was in a very raucous co-ed fraternity in college. We threw the best parties by far, for at least a couple of years we had the largest membership of any of the social groups on campus, and for 2 of the years my house was ground zero for party central. My friend’s Dad bought a house that was adjacent to campus as an investment property and we lived there, host to more keg parties than I can possibly recall. We were the generation who grew up thinking Animal House defined what college life was like, cartoonish as it was, and on several levels we strove to live up to the standards set in the movie.

We had our fraternity pledge party at the house for several years, and one of those years it was an absolutely brutally cold night, as in you could spit and it would freeze almost immediately. We had the kegs out on the back porch, and there was a balcony up above it that connected to my bedroom. At one point several of us were standing out on the porch braving the cold, smoking cigarettes and shooting the breeze. A friend of our, so drunk he could barely walk, came out of the house and made his way down the steps. There was a sheet of plywood at the foot of the stairs that we had put there because in the preceding week it had become so muddy that it sucked trying to get into the house. None of us knew it, but a thin veneer of ice had formed on the plywood, and when his foot hit that his legs went out from under him. He ened up sprawled on his back at the foot of the stairs, all of us including him laughing.

As he collapsed, what appeared to be snow started to fall over the plywood. Our friend stuck out his tongue and started to try and catch flakes with his mouth, rolling on the plywood, a huge grin on, giggling like a little kid. ‘It’s snowing, it’s snowing!’ he was saying.

I noticed the snow mysteriously seemed to be falling in a very localized area around the plywood, so I poked my head over the edge of the porch to figure out what was happening. I looked up and saw another friend on the balcony above relieving himself over the railing. Barely able to stop laughing I turned to the guy on the plywood and said ‘umm, that’s not snow dude…’

Fortunately for him he was too drunk to realize, and as the snowfall ceased he gathered himself up and wandered off into the night. I’ll never forget the look of childlike delight on his face as the ‘snow’ came down though and I still laugh to think of it.